Bloodshot: Kingdom of Shadows (Kindle Worlds) Read online

  Your father employs him, Jillian. Even if he did think of you as more than a coworker, it would be a dubious proposition at best to get involved with him.

  Jillian fetched a sigh. Now that she couldn’t argue with him.

  Could she?

  “Stop!”

  Jillian froze. Philip had barred her progress with an arm across her chest. Ordinarily she would have been offended had a man touched her that way. Her breasts were objects of fascination to them, and more than once she’d been groped by men looking for a cheap thrill. But Philip hadn’t been looking for a thrill.

  Philip had stopped her from taking a nasty fall.

  Frankie, Eddie, and Lou had moved up behind them and were now sweeping their flashlights around what appeared to be a sludgy tube. The tunnel was ten feet wide and reminded her of a waterslide. Only the drop was too precipitous for any waterslide, and a patina of some viscous black substance coated its curved bottom like wet tar.

  “What is that stuff?” Lou Carboni asked.

  “Congealed blood,” the vampire driver said.

  Frankie made a face, flapped his hand at the tunnel as if the feeble fanning motion would dispel the awful stench rising from it. “Aw, man, that’s just sick.”

  Eddie Maza stared down into the tube but said nothing.

  As Philip lowered his arm, Jillian put a hand on his shoulder. “Thanks.”

  Frankie turned and regarded their driver, who had moved up to join them. “We gotta find another way to wherever it is you’re taking us, man. This here’s a dead end.”

  The vampire grinned horribly. “You’re more correct than you realize.”

  And before any of them could speak, the vampire slammed into them, driving them all five into the mucky tube, and sending them tumbling head over heels into the shrieking darkness.

  CHAPTER SIX

  * * *

  The footsteps in the hallway had a strange, leaden quality that made Malcolm’s already taut nerves stretch even tighter. It wasn’t that they were loud—Lazarus didn’t move with a heavy-footed stride, like some apelike giants Malcolm had encountered—it was the atypical jerkiness of their rhythm, like there was something wrong with the enormous man’s gait.

  What did they do to him? he wondered and experienced a massive flush of guilt.

  It doesn’t matter, his conscience declared pitilessly. What matters is that you set him up to save your own skin. You told yourself he wouldn’t die—and apparently he hasn’t—but you knew whatever would go down would be terrible, and it sounds like Lazarus didn’t come through it unscathed.

  Malcolm’s pulse throbbed in his temples. Lazarus would be angry. No, not angry—furious.

  Malcolm trembled. Who was he kidding? Of course Lazarus would be furious. Malcolm had endangered not only Lazarus, but Neville and Jillian Alcott as well.

  Jillian most of all.

  Furious wouldn’t do justice to Lazarus’s feelings. The huge man would be wrath incarnate.

  As if to confirm this thought, Lazarus kicked the door open, the chain lock bulleting across the room and the door slamming into the wall with enough force to pulverize a good chunk of drywall and send a chalky puff of dust clouding into the air.

  As the drywall dust settled, the monstrous form of Michael Lazarus materialized. Malcolm watched the man’s grainy silhouette for a long moment, sure that Lazarus would simply stand there for hours, putting off the inevitable violence so that Malcolm could suffer as much as he deserved to suffer, and the worst of it was that he did deserve to suffer, did deserve whatever rough justice Lazarus decided to dole out.

  And then Lazarus was across the room and reaching for him, the man’s corded neck a broad cone of tendons and bulging muscles. Lazarus seized him by the collar, jerked him closer so hard Malcolm’s head snapped back and forth like a drink shaker. “Why did you do it, Malcolm?” Lazarus growled. “Why did you let them take Jillian?”

  At first Malcolm could only go limp in the huge man’s hands, his thoughts a parade of helpless admissions: I did it because I’m a coward. I did it because I’m weak and unable to deal with the consequences of my actions. I did it because I’m selfish and I care more about saving my own skin than I do about anything else. Perhaps most unforgivably of all, I did it because I could. Because I knew you would help me. Because I knew you would protect Neville.

  Lazarus shook him. Malcolm’s head snapped back and forth like the broken stalk of some weed being ravaged by hurricane-force winds.

  “Talk!” Lazarus shouted.

  Malcolm moved his lips, but they had turned to rubber. More, his vocal chords seemed to have ceased working.

  “I said TALK!” Lazarus bellowed, and this time the man’s voice sounded like something fed through a stadium sound system. With that voice Lazarus could announce the hitters at a baseball game, Malcolm decided. No amplification necessary.

  Faintly, Malcolm heard footsteps tiptoeing to his open doorway. A tentative female voice asked, “Everything okay in there?”

  It was Mrs. Runkle, Malcolm’s sweet, old next-door neighbor. A hair over seventy years old and weighing approximately seventy pounds, she stood hunched over in the still-dusty doorway and regarded them solicitously. She wore thick spectacles that magnified her eyes and a turquoise nightgown that reached down just past her knees. Beneath that there were varicose veins skirling down her legs and white socks hiked halfway up her calves.

  Malcolm imagined what a spectacle the pair must make—Lazarus holding Malcolm suspended two feet off the ground, their faces inches apart, Lazarus looking like a nuclear reactor about to melt down.

  “Is there anything I can do for you boys?” Mrs. Runkle asked.

  Malcolm looked at her sadly. Her husband had passed on three years ago and her two sons never visited, so she’d taken to mothering everyone on the fifth floor, with special attention paid to Malcolm, whose boozing frequently necessitated hangover day meals. Usually it was chicken soup, though occasionally Mrs. Runkle brought him turkey with homemade dressing.

  He stared down at her, hoping Lazarus wouldn’t scare her too badly. “We’re okay, Mrs. Runkle. You can close the door if you want.”

  She nodded. “Okay.”

  She shuffled backward, one bony hand drawing the door shut with her, but when she attempted to close it, the door would no longer fit in the jamb.

  “I think your big friend knocked it off kilter,” she observed, opening the door and testing it repeatedly, the door and jamb coming together with a dull thudding sound that did nothing for Malcolm’s encroaching migraine.

  “Well, this pesky thing,” she said, bonking the door against the shifted jamb again and again.

  Lazarus was watching her, the rage emanating from him like a dark red cloud.

  “Really, it’s fine, Mrs. Runkle,” Malcolm said. “Please let it go, and I’ll have the building super tend to it in the morning.”

  But Mrs. Runkle appeared not to have heard him. She tutted. “Would you look at that?” Bonk. Bonk. She shook her head. “Silly thing.” Bonk.

  “Hey, Lady,” Lazarus growled.

  She looked up at him. “Yes?”

  “Piss off.”

  She was gone with a quick swish of her turquoise nightgown.

  Lazarus turned back to him. “You better start talking now, or I’m gonna chuck you out that window.”

  “I deserve that,” Malcolm said.

  Lazarus drew him nearer. “You deserve worse.”

  Malcolm gulped. Like they sometimes did in moments of extreme fury, Lazarus’s eyes had taken on a reddish hue that reminded Malcolm of a movie he’d once seen. Some action film from the eighties …

  “You brought me to the museum,” Lazarus prompted. “You knew something was going to happen. Did you know they were going to take Jillian?”

  “No.”

  Lazarus whipped his body from side to side. “Don’t lie to me.”

  “I’m not lying,” Malcolm said. “Not anymore.”

  The r
ed eyes narrowed, the heat radiating from Lazarus’s body like standing next to a furnace.

  Malcolm stared into those red eyes a moment, then he had it: The Terminator. Lazarus’s eyes looked like the robot beneath Arnold Schwarzenegger’s skin. Only Lazarus’s eyes were a good deal more frightening.

  “I was instructed to get you to the museum,” Malcolm said. “That’s all I knew … all I was told. She didn’t say anything about Jillian. She didn’t tell me … what they were going to do.”

  “You better start explaining yourself,” Lazarus said. “Carboni’s thugs have Jillian right now.”

  Malcolm’s heart seemed to stutter for a couple beats. He frowned. “Carboni?”

  “You’re telling me you didn’t know Carboni was in on this?”

  Malcolm swallowed, shook his head. My God, he thought. What had he done? He stared into Lazarus’s face and felt a surge of hope. Lazarus still seemed furious, but he no longer appeared eager to kill him.

  Malcolm decided he could relax a little.

  Then Lazarus hurled him across the room.

  “I got an assignment,” Malcolm began. His head ached worse than ever, and almost as severe was the pain in the base of his neck. When Lazarus had tossed him across the room, he’d bashed the wall headfirst. The only silver lining—if a silver lining could exist in such a dreary, excruciating moment like this—was that Lazarus hadn’t thrown him a trifle to the left. Had he done that, Malcolm would have sailed right through the window and would now be painted all over the alley.

  “Was the assignment about betraying a loyal friend?”

  Malcolm looked up at Lazarus. The huge man had brought over a stool so he could stare down at Malcolm, who sat slumped on the ratty brown couch. Malcolm sighed. He realized with alarm that his eyes were misting over with tears. “No, it wasn’t about betraying a friend, though I suppose that’s what I ended up doing.” He shook his head. “My assignment was about vampires.”

  A corner of Lazarus’s mouth turned up. “Vampires?”

  “That’s how I felt too when it was first brought to me. My editor, a cocky, know-it-all punk five years removed from journalism school, plopped it on my desk with a look of smarmy triumph on his face. Most story assignments are communicated electronically these days, so when your editor makes a special trip from one side of the office to the other, you know it’s either a potentially fantastic story or an abysmal waste of time. Since he rarely brings me the good stuff—I’ve got to dig that up on my own these days—I knew this would be the latter.”

  “And it was about vampires,” Lazarus said.

  “No, it was about a group of young people who had gotten a reputation for partying and who wanted to set the record straight. They were first-generation Irish, and they’d been mentioned unfavorably by some of the other newspapers. You know, The Times, The Wall Street Journal—”

  “The legitimate places,” Lazarus said.

  Malcolm scowled. “At any rate, there had been several incidents involving a nightclub one of the Irish kids owned, and they wanted our paper to do a positive article outlining the merits of their organization. A fluff piece, in other words.”

  Lazarus’s grin was unpleasant. “Bet you were giddy about that assignment.”

  “Thrilled. Anyway, I met with a young woman named Mina Murray so she could educate me about the immigrants and their way of life.”

  Lazarus’s brow furrowed. “Why does that name sound familiar?”

  “Dracula,” Malcolm said.

  Lazarus’s face went tight. He stared beyond Malcolm, out into the darkening evening sky. “She was the one Count Dracula was obsessed with, wasn’t she? Lucy Westenra’s best friend?”

  Malcolm felt the hair on the back of his arms tingle. “Yes.”

  “I’ve been having dreams about Lucy the last few nights,” Lazarus said. “Neville always told me I had tendencies toward the psychic, but for some reason that was always harder for me to swallow than the other stuff. You know, the healing powers and the heightened perception.”

  “Because you can see those things in action,” Malcolm suggested. “You can feel them working in you.”

  Lazarus shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “I met Mina in a coffee shop near here and was surprised at how lovely she was. I’ve known many women, Lazarus, and it takes a rare type to affect me.”

  “She has to be willing to sleep with you,” Lazarus said.

  Malcolm shook that off, continued with his tale. “Imagine a girl,” he said. “Curvy, though not nearly full-bodied. Not particularly tall, though well over five feet. Silky black hair coiffed into old-fashioned ringlets and braids. A black raincoat covering her, but failing to hide her considerable physical attributes.”

  “Go on.”

  “Her Irish accent wasn’t so thick she seemed straight off the boat, but I could tell she’d lived there her whole life. The rain had been light but steady that night, and her braids and ringlets were sodden from walking outdoors. As I said, it wasn’t raining that badly that night, so I knew she’d walked a considerable distance.”

  “What’d she say?”

  Malcolm waved a dismissive hand. “The same balderdash my editor slapped onto my desk. She and her friends were immigrants, they were trying to make a go of their club, but due to some unfortunate incidents and some even more unfortunate press, she felt her circle had been unduly labeled miscreants and therefore desired a more accurate depiction of their way of life.”

  “She use that word? ‘Miscreants’?”

  Malcolm smiled. “She did. It was her manner of speaking as much as it was her physical charms which led me to become so fixated on her. No—why are you laughing?—it’s true! She spoke like someone straight out of … well, straight out of a Victorian novel, and what was more, she looked to me like I’d always imagined Mina Murray would look. When I brought up her resemblance to my mental picture, she seemed momentarily pleased, then angry at herself for being pleased. It wasn’t long after that she terminated our interview and scurried out into the night.”

  “And you followed her.”

  “I followed her. As I’d suspected, she had come a long way, much longer than I might have guessed. I made certain I was far enough behind her to avoid being discovered.” Malcolm paused, moistened his lips. “At least I fancied I was far enough away. She moved very swiftly, much more swiftly than her diminutive frame would seem to suggest. It felt like we walked for days, though I suppose it was much closer to an hour, before she took a sudden turning into an alley.”

  Lazarus visibly tightened. “This alley,” he said. “Is it near Fifth Street? Not far from the Guggenheim?”

  “No,” Malcolm answered, “but I suspect I know where the individual who ran you over got away to.”

  Lazarus was on him in an instant. Hands clutching his shirt, teeth bared, Lazarus said, “How did you know I was run over?”

  This time Malcolm did not quake with terror. He returned Lazarus’s glare good-humoredly. “You have a tire track on the back of your trench coat.”

  Lazarus started, glared at him uncertainly for a moment, then released him. Malcolm sagged back into the couch, which smelled strongly of cheap cigarettes and wasted years.

  Malcolm watched Lazarus sit back down before saying, “I followed Mina through the worsening drizzle until I thought my lungs would give out. You know I’m not a paragon of physical fitness, and rarely have I rued my fondness for an unhealthy lifestyle more. Yet somehow I was able to walk apace with her—until we reached that alley.”

  Malcolm massaged the back of his neck, where it still felt as though Lazarus had sizzled the flesh with a branding iron. “She disappeared like a wisp of smoke. I stood there gaping in the middle of the alley for a good while, utterly perplexed. Not only was there no place where she could have hidden—the alley terminated into a brick wall.

  “Frantic to find Mina, I cast glances left and right, studied the sheer brick walls of the alley, the ones on either side of me as well
as the wall before me. There were no fire escapes up which she could have clambered, no hidden passageways through which she could have slipped. I was nearly ready to give up my search. My lungs were burning, and the arches of my feet felt as though they’d been bludgeoned with meat mallets. I turned to go, but as I was doing so my eyes happened to spot the manhole cover down the alley a short stretch. When I reached it, I realized it had been left slightly ajar. ‘So that’s where my fair Mina has chosen to hide from me,’ I thought.” Malcolm lowered his head, regarded his interlaced fingers. “Now I suspect that manhole had been left askew to ensnare me.”

  “For such a smart guy …” Lazarus began.

  Malcolm threw up a hand. “I know, I’m criminally gullible at times. You don’t need to remind me.” He dropped his hand, stared miserably up at the ceiling, where old skeins of cobwebs drifted languidly in the stale apartment air. “It took a great deal of effort, but I was just able to unseat the manhole cover far enough to allow me to slip through. I smelled a great story, but I must concede it was the thrill of the hunt that compelled me to maintain my pursuit. It was the fragrance of the lovely young woman’s hair that drove me on.”

  Lazarus’s eyebrows went up. “You followed her into the sewer?”

  “Yes, and I smelled that most of all. The odor was indescribable. Even with my wordsmithing abilities, I doubt I’d be able to do justice to that fulsome, withering fetor. At any rate, I heard Mina’s footfalls up ahead, almost—and yes, I thought this at the time—as if she’d paused in the tunnel, allowing me to catch up with her. Then the pursuit began anew.”

  “Skip to the part when you found her.”

  “It wasn’t long,” Malcolm said. “She strode deeper and deeper into the gloom. The only illumination in the tunnel slanted down through the occasional manhole cover or sewer grate. I was careful to time my footfalls with hers, so as to escape detection. We had only been walking through that stygian passageway for five minutes or so when I heard the sounds of a struggle from up ahead. Not from where Mina was standing, but rather from a goodly distance beyond her. Mina seemed to pause too, but after she’d listened for a moment she splashed on ahead. I splashed after her, no longer mindful of concealing my presence.” Malcolm’s breathing tightened. He realized he’d been rubbing his wrist. “Oh, how I wish I’d stayed aboveground.”